This is a scalable context timeline. It contains events related to the event February 6, 2000: Apparent Mossad Attempt to Infiltrate Al-Qaeda Thwarted. You can narrow or broaden the context of this timeline by adjusting the zoom level. The lower the scale, the more relevant the items on average will be, while the higher the scale, the less relevant the items, on average, will be.

El Al Flight LY1862, en route from New York to Tel Aviv, crashes into a block of apartment buildings shortly after take-off from Schiphol Airport, located south-east of Amsterdam. At least 43 people on the ground are killed (The exact number of deaths is unknown, since many of the incinerated victims were undocumented immigrants). Information about the plane’s cargo and the crash is suppressed: El Al withholds information about the plane’s several tons of “military cargo;” 12 hours of videotape made during the rescue and clean-up operation (42 cassettes in all), along with police audiotapes, are erased and shredded; and El Al documents and the plane’s cockpit voice recorder (CVR) mysteriously disappear. It is later learned that the plane, a Boeing 747, was carrying several tons of chemicals, including hydrofluoric acid, isopro-panol and dimethyl methylphosphonate (DMMP)—three of the four chemicals used in the production of sarin nerve gas. The shipment of chemicals—approved by the US commerce department—reportedly came from Solkatronic Chemicals Inc. of Morrisville, Pennsylvania and its final destination was the Institute for Biological Research (IIBR) in Ness Ziona near Tel Aviv, Israel, which is reported to be the “Israeli military and intelligence community’s front organization for the development, testing and production of chemical and biological weapons.” A former IIBR biologist later tells the London Sunday Times in October of 1998, “There is hardly a single known or unknown form of chemical or biological weapon… which is not manufactured at the institute.” In fact, it was IIBR that provided the poison and the antidote used in the attempted assassination of a Hamas leader in Jordan in 1998. The IIBR does not appear on any maps and is off-limits even to members of Israel’s Parliament, the Knesset. Israel denies that the chemicals were to be used in the production of chemical weapons and instead claims that they were needed to test gas masks. But as an article in Earth Island Journal notes: “[T]his explanation is puzzling since it only takes a few grams to conduct such tests. Once combined, the chemicals aboard Flight 1862 could have produced 270 kilos of sarin—sufficient to kill the entire population of a major world city.” During hearings on the crash in 1999, it is learned that since 1973, El Al planes are never inspected by customs or the Dutch Flight Safety Board and that El Al security at Schiphol is a branch of the Israeli Mossad. Furthermore, it is discovered that every Sunday evening a mysterious El Al cargo flight arrives at Schiphol en route from New York to Tel Aviv. The flights are never displayed on the airport arrival monitors and the flights’ documents are processed in a special, unmarked room. [BBC, 10/2/1998; Earth Island Journal, 1999; Covert Action Quarterly, 10/20/2004] Over a thousand residents living near the crash site later become sick with respiratory, neurological and mobility ailments and a rise in cancer and birth defects is later detected among the population. [ZNet, 10/12/2002]

India’s largest Newsweekly reports that it appears a recent Mossad attempt to infiltrate al-Qaeda failed when undercover agents were stopped on their way to Bangladesh by Indian customs officials. These 11 men appeared to be from Afghanistan, but had Israeli passports. One expert states, “It is not unlikely for Mossad to recruit 11 Afghans in Iran and grant them Israeli citizenship to penetrate a network such as bin Laden’s. They would begin by infiltrating them into an Islamic radical group in an unlikely place like Bangladesh.” [Week, 2/6/2000]

“On or around” this day, the Mossad give their “latest” warning to the US of a major, imminent attack by al-Qaeda, according to sources close to Mossad. One former Mossad agent says, “My understanding is that the warning was not specific. No target was identified. But it should have resulted in an increased state of security.” US intelligence claims this never happened. [Sunday Mail, 9/16/2001]

Azhari Husin. [Source: Public domain]According to the 2007 edition of a book about the Mossad entitled “Gideon’s Spies,” shortly after the 7/7 London subway bombings (see July 7, 2005), the British domestic intelligence agency MI5 gathers evidence that a senior al-Qaeda operative known only by the alias Mustafa traveled in and out of England shortly before the 7/7 bombings. For months, the real identity of Mustafa remains unknown. But in early October 2005, the Mossad tells MI5 that this person actually was Azhari Husin, a bomb making expert with Jemaah Islamiyah, the main al-Qaeda affiliate in Southeast Asia. Husin used to study in Britain and reports claim that he met the main 7/7 bomber, Mohammad Sidique Khan, in late 2001 in a militant training camp in the Philippines (see Late 2001). Meir Dagan, the head of the Mossad, apparently also tells MI5 that Husin helped plan and recruit volunteers for the bombings. The Mossad claims that Husin may have been in London at the time of the bombings, and then fled to al-Qaeda’s main safe haven in the tribal area of Pakistan, where he sometimes hides after bombings. Husin will be killed in a shootout in Indonesia in November 2005. [Thomas, 2007, pp. 520, 522] Later official British government reports about the 7/7 bombings will not mention Husin.

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